Rebel Music: The Tuareg Uprising in 12 Songs by Tinariwen

Over the weekend, Tuareg rebels in West Africa made a rapid advance, capturing the cities of Kidal, Gao, and Timbuktu. If Mali is shaped somewhat like a butterfly, the rebels now claim to control its entire vast northern wing. The Tuareg people, longtime camelback masters of the barren byways of the central Sahara, have fought repeatedly over the past fifty years for a desert homeland autonomous from the mostly Bambara-speaking south. This revolt is already their most successful by far, fuelled by an influx of Libyan weapons commandeered during Muammar Qaddafi’s last gasp. Today, the main rebel group, the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (M.N.L.A.), claimed that they’ve advanced as far as they intend to, and said they’re ready to negotiate. But a splinter rebel faction called Ansar Dine wants to impose Sharia law across the country, and this morning its black flag was seen flying over Timbuktu.

Meanwhile, another group of Tuaregs is making its way across Europe. They’re the rock band Tinariwen, and they’re midway through their latest world tour. In February, Tinariwen won the Grammy for Best World Music Album for “Tassili,” which includes contributions from members of TV on the Radio and Wilco. In November, they made an appearance on the Colbert Report. They’re scheduled to play five shows in the U.S. in June. But twenty years ago, they were rebels themselves, and they haven’t ruled out becoming rebels once more. “We are military artists!” Abdallah Ag Alhousseini, one of the group’s guitarists and singers, recently told a journalist from Algérie News. “Today, if we see that our brothers need fighters rather than musicians, we will go to the front, because we are always ready to answer the call of the preservation of our land, our values, and our culture. This is what we do through music, and we will do it again with arms!”

So far, Abdallah has stuck to music; this week, he and his bandmates have been performing in France. But the battlefield is there with him, because the history of Tuareg insurrection is written throughout Tinariwen’s lyrics. Here, then, is a brief survey of fifty years of Tuareg uprisings as told through twelve Tinariwen songs. (Plus a Spotify playlist of all twelve.)

The first Tuareg rebellion in Mali peaked in 1963, shortly after Mali gained independence from France. Many Tuaregs felt that this new country was nothing better than a new colonizer, controlling their desert lives from another distant capital. The uprising was a disaster. Tinariwen’s leader, the lanky, quietly intense Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, was a young boy then; his father was executed for helping the rebels. Ibrahim sang about that time in one of the first songs he wrote, “Soixante Trois”:

’63 has gone, but will returnThose days have left their tracesThey murdered the old folk and a child just bornThey swooped down to the pastures and wiped out the cattle…’63 has gone, but will return

Ibrahim was right about that. But first came a different kind of disaster: two awful waves of drought and famine in the Sahara, in the mid-seventies and eighties. Jobless and desperate, countless Tuaregs walked the long desert miles north to oil-rich Libya, where they hoped to scrounge a living as migrant workers. The Tuareg poet known as Japonais, a sometime member of Tinariwen, sings about those years in Libya in “Ahimana” (“Oh My Soul”):

Dear Mother, since the time I left for Libya with patient stepsI arrived but I have been feeling aimlessI search for the money I need by any means necessaryBut it refuses to accumulate

In the eighties, when Qaddafi offered military training to the Tuaregs, thousands answered his call, and the founding members of Tinariwen were among them. They met in a Libyan training camp, and played their first performances there. Upon request, they once performed a song for Qaddafi himself. It was in Libya that Ibrahim developed Tinariwen’s signature sound. In Tamashek, the language the band sings in, their style is often simply called “guitar music,” which is apt, since at any given moment the group has as many as six guitarists, together creating a driving desert drone that owes nearly as much to John Lee Hooker as it does to traditional Tuareg forms.

In the early nineties, true to Ibrahim’s prediction in “Soixante Trois,” Tuaregs revolted in Mali again, this time bolstered by their Libyan training—and the members of Tinariwen joined the fight. It’s sometimes said that Tinariwen put down their guns in favor of guitars, but, in truth, for a time they bore both. When they weren’t fighting, they were making rebel music. Their songs didn’t just lionize the uprising, they fuelled it: cassettes of Tinariwen’s music were passed from hand to hand across the desert in what their former manager, Andy Morgan, called the “ghetto-blaster grapevine.” Here’s part of “Tamatant Tilay” (“Death Is Here”), which the band member Alhassane Ag Touhami wrote in 1983:

Let the blood boil if it is really in your veinsAt the break of day, take your arms and take the hilltopsWe kill our enemies and become like eaglesWe’ll liberate all those who live in the plains

In parts of Mali that were cut off by the fighting, Tinariwen’s cassettes were sometimes the only recorded music that could be found—like desert-island discs, minus the island. One of the best of their rebel songs is the rollicking “Chet Boghassa” (“The Women of Boghassa”), in which Abdallah promises to take back a particular Tuareg village from the Malian army. (Unfortunately, the band declined to include a translation of its Tamashek lyrics in their liner notes.) The song also showcases one of the band’s best sonic effects: the interplay of male and female voices.

“It was hard during the rebellion for me,” Ibrahim has said. “But it healed me. I forgot everything, even the death of my father. It was like therapy.” In a song called “Chatma,” he sings,

The fire has been burning for far too longIn our lost slumbersFor the burnt animals and the aged deadAt the gates of Kidal we must assembleAnd fightAs strong as you might beYou will burn in your fire

In 1992, the government of Mali signed a peace treaty with the rebels, and Tinariwen’s fighting days came to an end. The years that followed were fractious and confused, as the Tuareg were riven by tribalism and factionalism—some of it arising internally, and some of it fostered by the Malian government’s divide-and-rule tactics—leading to an alphabet soup of rebel acronyms, of which the M.N.L.A. is only the latest iteration. Tinariwen began singing about unity, as in the song “Toumast” (“The People”):

A divided people will never reach its goalIt will never cultivate an acacia tree with beautiful leavesA divided people will lose its wayEach part of it will become an enemy in itself

Another song, “Tenalle Chegret” (“The Long Thread”), touches on the confusion of war—bringing to mind the murkiness of the current rebellion, wherein the Malian government has accused the rebels of making common cause with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. The rebels hotly deny this, turning the charge back on the government. The facts have so far resisted confirmation. Tinariwen has expressed unambiguous support for the cause of the M.N.L.A., but it’s far from clear that a rebel victory would result in a regime that would support them back. As Ibrahim sings:

The revolution is a long thread,Easily twisted, hard to stretch.

After many long years of failed struggle, Tinariwen began writing songs that went beyond rebel music, in some cases reflecting on the efficacy of revolt, as in “Imidiwan Afrik Temdam” (“My Friends from All Over Africa”):

I have a question, a question which torments my soulMy friendsIs the revolution like those treesWhose branches will grow if we water them?I have lived with this obsession for ten yearsI have come among brothersMy friends, what do you think?These men have been living with oppressionSince the day of their birthThey cannot make the trees grow with their water

Or the song “Amassakoul ‘n’ Ténéré” (“The Traveller in the Desert”), which seems to question the very reality of tribe and community:

You who are organizedassembled, walking togetherHand in hand, you’re livingA path which is empty of meaningIn truth, you’re all alone.

Another theme that arose in these post-battle songs was the necessity for the Tuareg to hold tight to their defining traditions—particularly the Tamashek language, which has often been suppressed in the lands in which they’ve lived—while embracing progress and new ideas. Tinariwen is certainly not opposed to taking on new technologies, as is obvious from their fierce adoption of the electric guitar, whose status as the signature instrument of Tuareg musicians can be credited almost entirely to Ibrahim. Take the song “Kel Tamashek”:

Tamashek people, open yours eyesTamashek people, wake upWe’re in a world that’s moving fastHe who doesn’t pay heed will be lost

Or “Mano Dayak,” which credits a Tuareg rebel leader, who died in a plane crash in the midst of peace negotiations in 1995, for advancing his people:

Now I’ve seen something that fills me with joyA Tamashek who’s living wellAnd talking of his life on a satellite phoneTied to the tree under which he rests.The buds fall all around himAll of that is thanks to Mano Dayak

“The defense of our culture and our people is the very spirit of Tinariwen,” Abdallah told the journalist from Algérie News. “Of course, we signed peace agreements with the Malian government, but when you see that peace has no purpose, you must return to fight!” Today, that fight has only been emboldened by the coup in Bamako, Mali’s capital, last month. Meanwhile, drought and repeated crop failure threaten the lives of millions in the region, not least those who have been isolated or driven into exile by the fighting. Two members of Tinariwen—the bandleader Ibrahim and the acoustic guitarist Elaga Al Hamid—have reportedly been stuck in refugee camps near the Algerian border since February, and haven’t been able to join the current tour. I asked the band’s manager, Patrick Votan, if they’d joined the fight, but he said they hadn’t: “They’re more focussed on the human tragedy,” he said, and are trying to get food and water to their families and fellow-refugees as famine threatens.

Votan said that they hope to join the tour as soon as they can, but that even satellite-phone communication has been spotty. The band’s predicament brings to mind the song “Cler Achel” (“I Spent the Day”), which Ibrahim wrote about the droughts and exiles of years past:

It’s a time which separates the beloved from those they loveAnd when you think of them, painful obsessive thoughts are all that come.